You've Got to Feel It in Your Bones

December 2008. Having published the results of a lifetime of research, Sue Eakin, 90, has many other irons in the fire.

Nine file cabinets, both letter and legal size, block off one end of Sue Eakin’s living room. History books fill floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and file boxes line the floor.

This nook, which Eakin calls her “archives,” holds a lifetime’s research. Which is pretty impressive when you consider that she turns ninety on December 7 and is still active, having recently published her magnum opus, about which she spoke at the Louisiana Festival of the Book in October.

“I chopped my living room in half to make an archives,” says Eakin, who claims she knows exactly where to find the information she needs. Her living room also holds a secretary where her books are displayed. They include Solomon Northup’sTwelve Years a Slave and Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, released last year by the Center for Louisiana Studies. She has also written books about Rapides and Avoyelles parishes, a textbook on Louisiana, and Vanishing Louisiana, a book of historic photographs coauthored with Norman Ferachi.

Eakin’s house in Bunkie is close to her birthplace between Cheneyville and Lecompte in central Louisiana. Born Sue Lyles in 1918, she grew up in a large farming family on Bayou Boeuf (which she pronounces “Beff” in the local fashion).

“They were very down-to-earth people,” says Eakin of her family, which raised cotton and sugar cane. “There wasn’t any foolishness. Some [local] planters sort of wanted to be royalty. They lived higher than their income.”

A self-described “bookworm” as a child, Eakin never lost her early passion for the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped in upstate New York in 1841, sold into slavery, shipped to New Orleans, and eventually found himself in Avoyelles Parish, where he spent ten years on the plantation of Edwin Epps, whose many cruelties are vividly described in Twelve Years a Slave.

That book resulted from a fortuitous set of circumstances that led to Northup’s being rescued from bondage in 1853 and returned to his wife and three children in New York. Within three months, with the help of a ghost writer, Northup had published his story.

Coming out shortly after the fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book was hailed as a vivid account of the horrors of slavery. Except for a small reprint edition in 1890, the book went out of print and Northup was largely forgotten. (He mysteriously disappeared in 1863; no record of his death has ever been found.)

Eakin discovered Northup’s book when she was twelve. She rode along with her dad on a business call to Sam Haas (pronounced Hayes), owner of Oak Hall Plantation. To occupy her while she waited, Mr. Haas handed her a book—a first edition of Twelve Years a Slave.

Sue immediately recognized such place names as Red River, Bayou Boeuf, Cheneyville, and Lecompte, and realized she was reading a tale literally set in her own back yard. She was hooked.

“Never before had I seen a book written by an author actually familiar with our remote plantation country,” she writes in her introduction to the 2007 edition of the book. “I read this book as fast as I could, but I could not finish it before the men had completed their business and Dad was ready to go home. That meant giving up the book, and the disappointment must have shown in my face. Mrs. Haas, mother of Sam Haas, asked me if I wanted to come back to spend the day with her so I could read the book all day long. I did.”

A few days later, an aunt dropped her at the Haas house. Ensconced in an armchair in the wide central hall, Sue sat entranced by Solomon Northup’s story. “They fixed a nice lunch, and I ate with them, but then I went back to the book,” she recalls.

It was a defining moment. As Eakin puts it, “The book discovered me.” She was overcome with a passion to know more about Northup, to fill in the gaps in his story.

She entered LSU in 1936 and searched for the book without success in the library’s Louisiana Room. At Claitor’s bookstore downtown, she was overjoyed to find a copy for sale. She paid a quarter to Otto Claitor, who dismissed the book as “full of lies. There ain’t a bit of truth to it.”

She graduated with a degree in sociology in 1940 and in 1941 married Paul Eakin, whom she had met at LSU. They spent a few years in New Orleans and Waveland, Mississippi, before returning to the Bayou Boeuf area, where they raised five children. {Paul Eakin, an accountant, died in 1995.)

Eakin also began writing a weekly newspaper column for the Opelousas Daily World, commenting on local history and current events. (The column eventually ran in several newspapers in the area.) She outfitted a corner of her bedroom with a desk and “an ancient typewriter.”

Before long, she had bought “a cheap camera,” learned to use it, set up a home darkroom, and was taking photos for the column. “I just loved taking pictures,” she says. “I have a real good collection of what this area looked like back then.”

She also discovered oral history. Using a reel-to-reel recorder that weighed nearly fifty pounds, she traveled all over Louisiana talking to people.

“You don’t just learn to interview overnight,” says Eakin. “You’ve got to feel it in your bones. You’re trying to walk in their shoes; you are trying to be them for a while. You don’t tell about them, you try to be them.”

Most interesting, she says, were her interviews with Louisiana socialists in the Winnfield area. They are now part of the Eakin Oral History Collection at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where her son Paul is a math professor. The collection contains more than fifty interviews related to the history of Louisiana and the South, particularly African-American and agricultural history. (An additional two hundred or so audiotapes are still stored at Eakin’s house in Bunkie.)

In her mid-forties, Eakin returned to LSU and earned master’s degrees in journalism and history. At sixty-two, she earned her doctorate in history from the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now ULL) in Lafayette. She taught history at LSU in Alexandria (LSUA) for twenty-three years, retiring in 1987 as a full professor.

When she could fit it in, Eakin researched Northup’s story, checking census records and local courthouses for documents. Her children, four boys and a girl, often accompanied her on research trips. “We always said that Solomon was the sixth Eakin child,” says her daughter Sara Kuhn, an English professor in Chattanooga.

In the 1960s, Eakin met Joseph Logsdon, a professor at the University of New Orleans, who was also researching Northup’s story. In 1968, LSU Press brought out a new edition of Twelve Years a Slave, edited by Eakin and Logsdon. (A paperback edition published in 1975 is used in many college courses; the book has sold nearly 100,000 copies.)

But for Eakin, the story wasn’t over. She continued to do research on Northup, filling in the gaps. She corresponded with researchers in upstate New York, often just sitting down and calling every town library she could find, looking for local historians.

Her research resulted in the definitive edition of Northup’s story, according to James Wilson, assistant director of the Center for Louisiana Studies, who worked with Eakin on the book.

“Sue uncovered more than two hundred pages of previously unpublished supplemental material,” says Wilson. “She has much more information on the trial of the kidnappers and what happened to Solomon later.”

Eakin’s obsession with Northup’s story took some interesting turns. She wrote a musical about him, which was performed at the Bailey Theatre in Bunkie. She developed the Solomon Northup Trail, noting places where he had lived and worked, and wrote a guidebook for it. And she was instrumental in the preservation of the Edwin Epps house, home of the plantation master where Northup worked for a decade.

“The house was well described in the book,” says Eakin. “I got it listed on the Historic Register, what was left of it.”

Worried that it would be destroyed, Eakin next concentrated on getting the house moved to a location where it could be preserved, which turned out to be the school where she had taught for so long.

“I worked on that for almost ten years,” says Eakin. “I was determined. I’d done all I could and the house was still not moved. Finally, a contractor got a permit to move the house to LSUA [in 1999]. I was thrilled to death. Those men were big buddies of mine and knew how hard I’d worked. I remember almost crying.”

With the house preserved and her book on Northup published, Eakin is concentrating on other projects, one being a book about the late Eddie Jones, a female state legislator and civil rights leader from Shreveport. She is editing and annotating The Life and History of William O’Neal, a free man of color from central Louisiana. And there is still all that information about Louisiana socialists, including audiotapes.

“I’ve got to get those published,” says Eakin. “When I interviewed those people, I felt like I had hit pay dirt.”

Ruth Laney has written for national magazines. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.